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Monday, May 19, 2014

Urban Engines Launches to Use Data to Make City Transportation Better

As reported by GigaOm: Stanford computer science professor Balaji Prabhakar
first became interested in how transportation systems move when, years
ago, he got stuck in “the mother of all traffic jams” in India. Now,
after two years in stealthy development, Prabhakar and his co-founder,
former Google exec Shiva Shivakumar, are launching a startup called Urban Engines
that is using data, algorithms and behavioral economics to help make
cities less congested and urban transportation operate more efficiently.

In an office in downtown San Francisco this week, six stories above
the blaring horns of buses and cars running up and down Market
Street, Shivakumar and Prabhakar showed me a screen of a train system
that could be any big city in the world — Sao Paulo, San Francisco,
Bangalore. Prabhakar clicked the play button and we watched a
geometrical visualization of the flow of train commuters moving into
stations, getting on trains and getting off at their stops. Some trains
were too full, some not full enough. It was mesmerizing to watch, in a
weird way.But for city planners and transportation operators it could be an
entirely new way of doing things. Urban Engines has built a system that
can take data mostly from commuter transit cards — the bus card, the
subway card (if you’re in San Francisco, your Clipper card) — and use
algorithms to infer information about how commuters and the
transportation flow are behaving.Without embedding any sensors in the subway or video cameras watching
the platforms, Urban Engines can tell things like how long commuters
were waiting, how many trains went by that were so full commuters couldn't get on and what the volume of each train car was throughout the
day. It only needs the data from when the commuter enters and exits the
station, and by knowing the aggregate of all the commuter data at the
same time, it can infer how the system is operating. It can do the same
thing with a city bus system.Essentially, Urban Engines is taking the smallest and cleanest amount
of data possible to map out the entire public transportation network.
The approach means that it can build such a monitoring system much more
inexpensively than comparable transportation systems that use sensors,
video cameras or even people manually observing and counting. A
surprising amount of city accountability around transportation comes
from city workers standing next to potential problem areas and observing
— not exactly efficient or accurate.The second piece of Urban Engine’s idea comes from behavioral
economics: offering incentives or punishments to shape behavior. After
identifying problem spots in transportation systems, it can help city
planners use incentives to make the systems run better. For example, if
too many people are using buses early in the morning, incentives (like
being entered into a lottery) could be provided to encourage commuters
to take the bus an hour later. Or if some train stations are being
over-used and others are being under-used, incentives could be provided
to get more commuters to the under-used stations.Many of the ideas around incentives are based on the work that
Prabhakar was doing at Stanford. He’s the director of the Stanford
Center for Societal Networks, which works on making “societal networks
smarter, more scalable and more efficient.” After leaving Google,
Shivakumar (who’s Urban Engines’ CEO) came to Stanford as a visiting
researcher to reboot, and the pair have been working together ever
since.Even though this might be the first time you’re hearing about them,
Urban Engines actually already has some early traction and a hot list of
investors. It’s working with the World Bank to implement its system for
the buses in Sao Paulo. It’s helping Singapore shift its train
commuters from peak hours to off-peak hours. And it’s got an early
deployment with the train system in Washington, D.C. It’s also done
pilots projects in Bangalore, with Infosys, on the Stanford campus.Last year, Urban Engines raised a Series A round from some of the
most prominent investors in the Valley, including Andreessen Horowitz,
Google Ventures, Eric Schmidt, Greylock, SV Angel and angel investor Ram
Shriram. The executives didn’t disclose the size of the round, but
they’re employing about 20 people.The underlying macro trend behind Urban Engines is that the
population is growing rapidly, and by 2050 there will be 9 billion
people on the planet. Much of the growth is happening in cities, and
worldwide, more people now live in cities than outside of cities. City
transportation systems will only get increasingly crunched over the
coming decades. City planners and transportation builders will need new
tools to help manage the influx.

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About Me

I have more than 25 years of experience in development, design, and mobile communications products and technology. I also enjoy skiing, hiking, scuba, tennis, reading, traveling, foreign languages, and painting. I'm an active member of the National Ski Patrol (NSP) and volunteer my time at either Loveland Ski resort, or Ski Cooper.